unfaithful muse: Intimacy and ethics in autobiographical fiction.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 337
ISBN-13: 9780494218570
Description: In the fraught love triangle involving authors, their intimates, and their readers, intimates can feet betrayed when they believe themselves to have become the "material" for fiction. How did such feelings come to be so common? The first chapter of this study explores the development of biographical interest in fiction from antiquity to the twentieth century, observing that literary texts have long played with the boundary between fact and fantasy, and that autobiography and the novel evolved dialectically in relation to one another. The second chapter attends to more recent trends with regard to privacy, confession, and literature, arguing that the poetics of impersonality articulated by the New Critics facilitated the advent of confessional poetry directly rather than antagonistically. Also crucial to biographical readings of fiction has been the growth of a matrix of media that generates and exploits controversies over fiction's ethics and referentiality. The third chapter focuses on readers' autobiographical desire: i.e., a desire to read fiction as based in the lives of its authors, who are both ubiquitous in paratexts and, in another sense, radically absent from their fiction.The fourth chapter inaugurates a focus on the relationship between authors and intimates. In cases when fiction is seen to be offensively based on reality, often the texts in question do not challenge intimacy so much as expose pre-existing fault-lines in relationships. The fifth chapter examines a wide range of techniques that authors use in order to protect their intimates' sensitivities, not least the writing of metafiction, which can both air loved ones' perspectives and also further appropriate their voices. The sixth chapter considers intimates' responses to putatively offensive fiction, arguing that such efforts inevitably exacerbate the alienation and public exposure that have been anathema to intimates in the first place. Moreover, as the final chapter argues, they must deal with authors' self-identifications as rebels who defy conventional norms of privacy and reticence. The conclusion imagines the possibility of an alternative poetics in which fiction is not divisive but rather revises and revitalizes intimacy.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-01, Section: A, page: 0198.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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